The Color Maps should look bad alone. If everything in real life was just its coloring, real life would look bad too.

A texture is made up of many layers... Base color, specularity, normal/bump, lighting, translucency, etc.

The textures themselves are very poor, and are masked by these new technologys that "cover them up" so to speak.

The only new tecnology is not blending the all the layers in Photoshop... They are blended in the game engine instead.

D3: All lighting is dynamic, for geometry and textures.

HL2: Much of the lighting is prerendered, for the geometry and textures.

Dynamic doesn't look as good as static, because it has to be processed in real time.

What Doom 3 was trying to do was avoid awkward combination of dynamic and static.

In one of the half-life screen shots, you can see a character's dynamic shadow within the static shadow of a building... and the shadows go in different directions. In real-life (and in the doom 3 engine), the character shadow would not be visible.